Paris Red: A Novel (28 page)

“Did he leave you? Is that why you’re here now?”

“No. Maybe. His father died. He’s away. I don’t know for how long.”

“Do you really think you’re anything to him?”

I let the words sink in. She has the right to say them—she knows him, knows the game he played. And she knows me. Above all she knows me.

“I think I’m something to him,” I say. “I’m not sure what.”

She watches me but does not say anything, and then she looks away from me. But there is nothing for her to say. It is not why I came, anyway—I did not come to talk about him. I came to see her. Whatever else is true, that is true. I came to see her, to sit on a step with her, shoulder to shoulder. To slurp soup.

“I think you’re bad luck,” Nise says then, still looking out into the air. “I think the only reason you’re here is that he’s gone.”

“I came once before. You were with Toinette. I felt bad about lying to you.”

Even from the side, I can see her shaking her head.

“You know, I never wanted him the way you did.”

“At the start you did.”

“Maybe. But not in the end. Not enough to lie for.”

“I didn’t want to lie.”

“But you did.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she tells me. “You’re not my concern.”

The two of us stand, take our empty bowls and spoons back to the marchande. After we hand them over, we begin making our way back to the courtyard.

“That was a stupid thing I said when I first saw you, wasn’t it?” Nise says just before we get to Baudon, and this time she does look at me. Even now, I still feel the space forming around me that I always felt when she looked at me. It is what her eyes do to me.

“No, I really thought,
Here’s Louise. Maybe she’s come to get her old job back.
”

“I’ll come back if I have to,” I tell her.

“No you won’t. You got away once. You’re smart enough to stay away. So stay away. We’re like smoke. Remember?”

It is what she and I always used to say about ourselves when we were out and about, meeting this one and that, scheming ways to get someone to buy us dinner: we were like smoke, always able to find a way in and a way out.

“You can’t come back here anyway,” she says then, and nods once at the courtyard. “You aren’t the same. You couldn’t take the job anymore.”

I do not say anything. I do not say anything about how little money I have left, or how just yesterday morning I was looking at my burnisher. I do not even bother to say,
I can take it.

I hug her instead. She smells of metal, crocus martis suds, and her own scent, which is hair and skin and sweat. She smells the way I used to smell. Holding her, I think of all the times she pulled away from us—from him and me. I think of how I would have gone along with it all if she had permitted it. If she had wanted me, too.

Before she pulls away now, I say, “Je pense fort à toi.”

I think she might tell me she misses me, too—I think I can feel that in her—but she does not say anything. Just starts to walk into the Baudon courtyard. But just before she turns in, she looks back over her shoulder.

“I’m at Toinette’s. Don’t forget,” she calls.

And it is like a little light coming in at the bottom of a closed door.

T
he next day, to forget
about breakfast, I go to Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare, La Maison du Pastel. He sent me here once with a list of colors, and I always wanted to come back. Today I feel better as soon as I see the yellow sign in the window.

The shop itself is filled with hundreds of drawers and wooden trays, all of which hold the pastels. But you do not have to bother anyone to open the drawers in order to see all the colors—they have a display of all their pastels hanging on a wall. Real bâtonnets glued to panels. Pastels in all their nuances at the center, surrounded by four oblong rings of colors, with the slenderest bâtonnets on the inside and the largest coniques on the outside.

That is the thing about pastels: the color is not hidden away inside a tube like paint is. So I am able to see:

Standing there, I think if I were going to buy colors to really use, I would need a variety—a rainbow or a bouquet. But the way the pastels seem prettiest to me is the way the shop has them arranged, color by color, with all shades side by side. You can see what black does to a color, and also white. And I know from the day I picked up bâtonnets for him that they have all the variations of a color arranged in a single drawer, in columns and rows, with the darkest at the bottom left and the lightest at the top. As if the colors were families, with the brooding ones on the bottom and the bright happy ones on top.

When the man behind the counter asks me if I have brought a list today for Monsieur, I shake my head no.

“No list today. I just wanted to see the colors,” I say, and he nods. He nods as if it is the most normal thing in the world, that someone like me—a girl with no money, in a mended dress—would come just to see his colors.

I turn to leave the store, but just as my eyes sweep over the trays one last time, I see a small wooden box on the counter, opened to show the pastels inside. When I step closer, I see they are all blues. Seven bâtonnets, seven shades of one blue family, all in a box that could fit in my palm.

“Bleu outremer,” the man tells me when he sees me looking.

As soon as I hear the name it makes me think of his box of pastels, which is nothing fine. No brass clasp on the box, and none of the bâtonnets have any paper left on them. They are broken and in pieces, some worn down to nub ends. In that shabby box he has not only shades of bleu outremer but also carmin, vert pomme, violet iris, jaune orangé brillant, rouge capucine, cadmium orangé, jaune d’or and vert forêt. Those were the colors he wanted to replenish, that he wrote down on the list he sent me to buy that day—the list I saved and tucked in the back of my sketchbook.

I do not say anything. I stand there and nod, trying to fix all of it in my mind. Not just the variety of blues, but the way they look in the box. Like tiny birds or jewels or flowers, I do not know which.

That is the picture I carry in my mind when I walk away. I do not feel hungry or scared when I think of those blues in a small brass-clasped box. Bits of sky that could fit in my hand.

F
rom Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare
I walk over to Rue Rambuteau, heading toward Rue Pirouette. I see the people around the marchande before I see her there on the trottoir, underneath an awning. She sits with four kettles around her and dishes up from the kettle right in front of her, the only one with the lid off. For ten sous you get a small piece of bread and a ladle of soup.

Still soupe du matin but so late that I get the bottom of the pot where the creamy broth has thickened with chunks of cabbage and leeks. At first I smelled the soup, so blindingly cabbage that it perfumed the air for a block, but now that I am standing here, eating, I cannot smell it. Can only feel the fullness in my mouth and the warmth going down.

Three workers in their aprons and caps stand there with me, slurping.

When I’m done, I hand my bowl to the old man sitting beside the marchande, who has been steadily washing bowls and spoons in a wooden bucket. I finish before any of the workmen.

The first meal of the day, and maybe the last. I should have taken my time eating it. Should have been more like the workmen, who did not eat as quickly as I did for fear of leaving most of their soup on their mustaches.

W
hen I get back to
my room La Dame Gaillard says someone came by to see me.

“Not Monsieur. Another man,” she says, and watches me.

“Did he leave a message?” I say, keeping my voice flat.

She does not saying anything but hands me a letter, one written on heavy paper in handwriting I think I recognize but cannot place. I do not know what to think, but I do not let anything show on my face. Do not open the envelope until I get to my room.

The letter is from Alfred Stevens.

Who has been asked to come by, who prepared this letter in case I was gone, who has been told I may be short on funds, who is glad to be trusted so much by his friend and, he hopes, by me—and who will, if I permit him, pay me my salary if I will be so kind as to come to his studio the following day.

Who is graciously mine.

The letter is so polite it does not seem real, but it is real, along with the repeated address of his studio on 18 Rue Taitbout, and another of his cards. I am so relieved after reading about the promised money that I feel light-headed. Then I think, no, I am light-headed because all I had to eat today was soup on the street because I thought I would do best to get by on lunch and dinner if it turned out I had to make my money last longer.

The letter banishes all those fears. Even though it is from Stevens, of course it is from him. And after I am done feeling woozy, that is what I think: whatever it is he is going through, he managed to think of me in the midst of it. And that matters as much as the promise of money. Even in my hunger I know that.

I put the letter away and take myself out to Raynal’s. For a second I think about ordering a chop but do not—it is best if I keep close to the seam until I see the money in my hand. Besides, I think I would shock le maître if I ordered anything other than soup.

Shock myself as well.

Stevens’s studio on
Rue Taitbout is nothing like Rue Guyot.